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Damn, on Friday, the California DoJ Attorney General issued a warning to consumers about their data: https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bont... This should've been a giveaway that the company was imminently going to go under.
Given such a late warning, is there any staff left to do the data deletion requests before it heads off into bankruptcy courts
Can some billionaire please buy 23andMe's corpse and delete all data and physical samples they have? Even if you have never used 23andMe several people you are related to already have so they have a partial genetic profile of you.
This is unfortunate news for anyone whose data is now one of the assets to be sold to the highest bidder.
Honestly it's always seemed completely insane to me that people signed up for these services. Possible Pros: You find out you are 20% Norwegian! Fun! Possible Cons: Grandma is going to prison for an unsolved crime. Assume a non-threatening position and comply with all orders of the new Department of Racial Purity. Also, that's not your real Dad.
Fuck me right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Says someone who has never experienced a data loss bug.
Was the data really important? Is it worth holding people's data hostage because of subpar developers? I'm not at all saying that soft deletion shouldn't exist. I'm arguing that hard deletion should be the default, and then soft deletion practices should have some justification. Instead the industry chose to just soft delete everywhere, which is good for the industry, and bad for users.
It should just be followed up by hard delete several days or weeks later. The general policy should never be to hold things indefinitely.
As a practical example I have soft deletion for more or less everything on my desktop. There are periodic filesystem level snapshots and those stick around until I manually GC them. It has saved me more than once.
23andMe has been in a deadlock for a while. - The CEO is effectively the control owner of the company, having 49% of the voting right. She has been trying to take the company private for some time. - Last August, she proposed to buy all the outstanding shares at $8 per share. The board rejected. She installed a new board, and submitted her proposal again at $2.53 per share. The board rejected. She tried it a third ti…
Already downloaded and deleted my data. It’s so wild that some new buyer could just buy peoples’ genetic data at a fire sale.
23andMe has been in a deadlock for a while. - The CEO is effectively the control owner of the company, having 49% of the voting right. She has been trying to take the company private for some time. - Last August, she proposed to buy all the outstanding shares at $8 per share. The board rejected. She installed a new board, and submitted her proposal again at $2.53 per share. The board rejected. She tried it a third ti…
So rather than $8 a share they get zero? Sounds like the board was the one that messed things up.
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You buy a kit one time in your life. I'm more amazed that people thought it could be a profitable business once everyone that was going to had purchased their one kit per lifetime. And it wasn't even $200, it was more around $100 or even less if you didn't want ancestry + health. I wonder if I can still get the locked away health part haha?
What do you need though? One lab and software they already have?
A normal "small business" doing this could run with 3 software gals, 2 genetics guys, and a CEO that handles finances and management responsibilities. A "small lifestyle business" like that could make an okay profit for all involved.
A startup, however, took $XXMM in VC funding, which included strong encouragement that "you have to hire this many people, we want at least 10x growth".
Once you hire a team of 30 people to manage your servers and a team of 180 software engineers to write your webpage, it's super hard to scale back down to a scrappy 3-5 person software team.
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I guess I'm in the camp that considers your con a pro. If my Dad wasn't or isn't my biological dad, I would want to know. And I'd be grateful to any service that informed me.
This exact scenario happened to my wife. Grew up thinking her dad was her dad and that she was of some certain ancestry. I remember her and I both spitting into a tube in our SF apartment in San Francisco in 2012 and mailing them off. A few years later, we look at the ancestry data and there is a big surprise (she was ~50% something that she was sure 0% before that). Turns out her dad wasn’t her dad and she was donor…